In May and early June, the water garden at Fairhaven fills with candelabra primulas, planted in such numbers that the ground colour shifts week by week. They are the signature of a garden that Major Henry Broughton, later the 2nd Lord Fairhaven, laid out over roughly fifteen years after buying the South Walsham estate in 1946. He also brought in North American skunk cabbage and Himalayan camellias and rhododendrons, and the mix has the slightly improbable quality of a private collection that outgrew its owner. The garden opened to the public in 1975 and is run by a trust; Melanie Broughton, the founder's granddaughter, chairs the trustees.
You come here for the walking as much as the planting. Nearly four miles of marked paths run through 136 acres of protected habitat, the woodland trails leading out to the private South Walsham Inner Broad, where seasonal boat trips, paddleboarding and bookable wild swimming are on offer. Dogs are welcome on short leads. The events calendar runs to Bat Night, Dog Day and a festive lights walk in winter.
The war reached this quiet water. The hall and formal gardens became a convalescent home, the woodland a Home Guard training ground. Pleasure boats were sunk in the Inner Broad and barbed wire strung across it to stop flying boats landing; tanks were hidden in the garden, and some of the tank bays are still visible among the trees.
The Fairhaven café is open throughout the year, though hours can vary by season, and you do not need a garden ticket to use it. Alongside breakfasts, light lunches and homemade cakes, the set piece is afternoon tea: sandwiches, cakes, and warm scones with jam and clotted cream, with gluten-free, vegetarian and vegan versions available. Dogs are not allowed inside, but the covered veranda has dog beds and water bowls, and you can order at an outside window.
Bring the café appetite, because the village no longer has a pub. The Ship, first licensed in 1789, stopped trading during the 2020 lockdown and has since been approved for conversion to housing; the King's Arms was demolished in 2022 after the building became unsafe. For a drink you now travel out.
The churches are worth visiting. St Mary and the former St Lawrence share a single churchyard, which is unusual and immediately obvious once you are standing in it. St Mary is the working parish church, flint and limestone, with a fifteenth-century knapped-flint tower and a south porch carrying flushwork and carved Annunciation spandrels. Inside are an octagonal font on medieval tiles, benches with poppyheads, and a painted screen recording the freeing of one John Galt from bondage in 1437, with its original doors still hanging. St Lawrence was gutted by fire in 1827, and after long redundancy was restored and rededicated as a church in 2002, giving the fire-damaged shell a second life rather than a slow ruin.
Getting here means the B1140 off the A47, or the weekday 71A bus, which threads South Walsham to Ranworth, Woodbastwick and Wroxham; the Konectbus 9 runs in to Norwich.
Close by, the Ranworth boardwalk crosses wet carr woodland to a thatched visitor centre floating on the broad. In winter the gulls come in to roost in their thousands, and, as the wildlife trust puts it, "at twilight they fall like snow."